When the gaze of others is too heavy,

 The consequences: the weight of the gaze of others restricts initiatives, inhibits action, each skill is questioned, scrutinized, every project is understood through the prism of difficulty, incapacity, perfectionism or failure . And when this gaze is too heavy, too intimidating, those who experience it prefer to give up, or even not initiate any project, because their emotional cost is too high

Embarrassment, shame, guilt, and humiliation all imply the existence of value systems. Whereas shame and guilt are primarily the outcome of self-appraisal, embarrassment and humiliation are primarily the outcome of appraisal by one or several others, even if only in thought or imagination.

Humiliation need not involve an act of aggression or coercion. People can readily be humiliated through more passive means such as being ignored or overlooked, taken for granted, or denied a certain right or privilege. They can also be humiliated by being rejected, abandoned, abused, betrayed, or used as means-to-an-end.

Immanuel Kant famously argued that, by virtue of their free will, human beings are not means-to-an-end but ends-in- themselves, with a moral dimension that invests them with dignity and the right to ethical treatment. To humiliate people, that is, to treat them as anything less than ends-in-themselves, is therefore to deny them their very humanity.  Shame is the felt sense of being defective and inadequate. Brene Brown defines it as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”